I've been playing Skyrim with the current version for around 30 hours now, and I must say I am quite satisfied! With an ordinary fresh character Adept difficulty works great and Bosses tend to be very serious fights (altho manageable, use some of those potions..) Skills and weapons seem to balance well (the char is an 1H/Shield, Bow, Destruction hybrid, and it is all very viable.) There are some interesting differences in gameplay that are appreciated. Getting Smithing to 100 early is no longer "necessary", for example.
Currently I'm considering whether an NPC or merchant mod is necessary, since balance is already very good, even tho you can buy virtually everything from NPCs at higher levels.
Please note that there still is an exploit remaining that allows for exaggerated character stats. It involves the Dawnguard DLC, becoming a Vampire and getting the Necromage perk. This by itself is fine and I considered it in my calculations (a flat +25% increase in buff strength), altho such a character might want to use the difficulty enhancements of the secondary plugin. In any case, with such a character an exploit is possible that may happen by accident. I wont go into more revealing details, but you should check your Magic Active Effects occasionally to see if there are any "ghost effects" of items no longer worn. This has nothing to do with the plugin itself; it is a problem with the base game and Dawnguard DLC, and I have not yet figured out how to prevent it without making the Necromage perk significantly less useful, maybe it will be possible to simply exclude the player from its effects.
In short: I found a bug in 1.1 RC#1 fixed it, but that caused another problem. Then I went to bed. I'm working on it now. 1.1 should be Live again soon (tm).
#Edit: Maybe not, the problem seems to stem from native code for the most part.. still looking into it, but I might have to look for another way to approach this.. again.
I'm just gonna use this as some sort of dev-blog when I have something.. like now.. The Restoration glitch is very easy to fix with low intervention. 1 change: Restoration potions now reduce the cost of Restoration spells. Should be alright considering we already have Potions of Ultimate Healing. They could however be quite useful for low level mages. Buffing Restoration power improved way too many things and caused infinite loops in combination with Enchanted Alchemy gear (improving buffs through a buff is a bad idea. Recursion musn't happen).
I will patch this in soon, but there's still some other, serious issues I'm looking into.
The game broke again. I dare calling it a bug. Ever seen a +2000% Enchanting potion? I did, because I made one, without cheating or exploiting the Restoration glitch. That obviously isn't balanced and made me remember that glitch in the first place.
I didn't find any other big problems, but there's these two exploits that make things impossible to balance; as if Twin Souls and Extra Effect weren't bad enough.
I am investigating whether these glitches can be prevented while keeping true to the spirit of the mod, but currently I am unsure. Maybe there's a completely different way to approach this (possibly while keeping weapon improvement).
Hello PetPet and thanks for your constructive reply. I will look into all the issues you mentioned. I did not do research ingame yet apart from the pre-release testing, so this is just my preliminary thinking regarding
- Dual-Wielding and melee : I realize 2x1H (still) does the most melee damage (as is appropriate), but dont forget 2H being buffed 50%, and 2H can also block. Whether all this is balanced (benefit of a shield vs benefit of second weapon vs 2H vs magic), especially considering all the factors I am unable to say; we will have to wait for a lot of feedback on that I think.
- Combat duration : This is a valid concern and will be investigated. Generally, I dare say that if combat takes too long you set the difficulty too high. I have little data on this, yet, and have to do some testing in regards to power attacks.
- Mages : They are unchanged, so disregarding the new difficulty levels (which affects the player only) they certainly are more powerful now conpared to weapon damage than they used to be. It's a bit of the ssence of the mod: Basicly everybody is as bad as a Mage now. Also: it is easy to forget power attacks in calculations. In bursts melee can still easily outdamage a Mage.
- Compatibility : It's designed to work on its own, changing Skyrim minimally to make it enjoyable without sweeping changes. difficulty_1.0.esp can work standalone, in addition to anything that does not also affect the difficulty slider. While this is not intended I made sure it can work that way to broaden the appeal. It's ok to just download it for the difficulty slider changes! balance_1.0.esp is more tricky. I don't think it will break many mods, even balance one, since who deactivates the Grindstone? But it could obviously unbalance the game if another mod attempt to balance the game while keeping weapon improvement (which would then become impossible).
- Bow : This applies to all melee weapons, and the whole gameplay, since it is more difficult, except for Mages who keep their level of mediocrity as before. Bow itself has a base damage like a greatsword or so and improves in exactly the same way. Perked to 1.0 speed its base dps should be good enough; but of course Before we had one more way to improve damage: Smithing, which was way too powerfull. Now we're left with Potions, Perks, Skills, Enchants: the more difficult ones, and you have to utilize them more now to keep your level of difficulty. In general, refusing to optimize just means playing at lesser difficulty, and without optimizing noone really has to worry about balance in the first place.
- Conclusion : It is clear the balance in difficulty moved, the player is weaker now but should also be playing at lesser difficulty. Combat might in fact be shorter.
Dual Wield power attacks certainly have to be investigated. The discrepancy between 1 x 1H and 2 x 1H has been bothering me anyways, and power attacks might get out of hand, especially with Redguards. If there is a problem here it should be easy to fix, tho.
#Edit: Some mistakes I made: Bow is in fact between 1H and 2H melee; this is significant. Also, Bow speed varies very widely. Needs some testing, too!
#Edit2: Dual Savagery (+50% Dual Wield Power Attack damage) is a bit of an upset but so is Twin Souls. I feel empowered to disregard Orc and Redguard racial ability since it's once per day only. It's ok to be totally uber once per day I think. Currently I mostly wonder whether shields are worthwhile compared to a second 1H weapon; it might boil down to preference (which would be good).
I certainly try not to fall for the fallacy of trying to get everything to balance perfectly. there's bound to be advantages in one situation or another... investigating Bows next.
#Edit3: Bows seem to work fine, thanks to arrow damage. I sure would like to enchant me some arrows now, but I suppose there's another mod for that already. From testing the balance overall seems to be very good (really, the only reason I decided to release it instead of just using it).
I like the mod concept. From what I have read however, I got the following impression:
- Archers that uses light bow (low dps high fire rate) who do not use poison and sneak would become an awfully unattractive play style, even with power shots and critical hits. And archers will do Worse when fighting dragons (assuming the use of deadly dragons or mighty dragons)
- Knowing the vanilla game has so few NPCs with dual style (unless we use mods like UFO), player will gain major advantages while focusing on dual perks (notice the last dual perk boost damage that does not rely on critical chance)
- All other melee play style (while factor out difficulty and smithing changes) will have their dps dropped siginificantly, except dual. Knowing the limitation of Skyrim vanilla enemy AI (terrible in using blocks) you are basically encouraging player to use blocks to gain an advantage. I am expecting all melee combats to last much longer. IMO it is not that enticing as I know how boring vanilla melee combat could be...
- Mages (player and enemies) can cause (relatively) far more damage than any melee fighters. Though I am hoping the (nerfed) archers can still be serious threat to mages.
- While I can use other combat mods to remedy some of my concerns. However, most (all?) of them attempted to balance the combat damage system...and is likely to conflict with your design pcinciples.
My mistake. I replaced the original file with an updated one (changes to the readme.txt mostly, since it was slightly messed up). Bad timing, my apologies.
9 comments
With an ordinary fresh character Adept difficulty works great and Bosses tend to be very serious fights (altho manageable, use some of those potions..)
Skills and weapons seem to balance well (the char is an 1H/Shield, Bow, Destruction hybrid, and it is all very viable.)
There are some interesting differences in gameplay that are appreciated.
Getting Smithing to 100 early is no longer "necessary", for example.
Currently I'm considering whether an NPC or merchant mod is necessary, since balance is already very good, even tho you can buy virtually everything from NPCs at higher levels.
It involves the Dawnguard DLC, becoming a Vampire and getting the Necromage perk.
This by itself is fine and I considered it in my calculations (a flat +25% increase in buff strength), altho such a character might want to use the difficulty enhancements of the secondary plugin.
In any case, with such a character an exploit is possible that may happen by accident.
I wont go into more revealing details, but you should check your Magic Active Effects occasionally to see if there are any "ghost effects" of items no longer worn.
This has nothing to do with the plugin itself; it is a problem with the base game and Dawnguard DLC, and I have not yet figured out how to prevent it without making the Necromage perk significantly less useful, maybe it will be possible to simply exclude the player from its effects.
I'm working on it now. 1.1 should be Live again soon (tm).
#Edit: Maybe not, the problem seems to stem from native code for the most part.. still looking into it, but I might have to look for another way to approach this.. again.
#Edit2: Currently creating a clean RC#2 plugin.
The Restoration glitch is very easy to fix with low intervention. 1 change:
Restoration potions now reduce the cost of Restoration spells. Should be alright considering we already have Potions of Ultimate Healing. They could however be quite useful for low level mages.
Buffing Restoration power improved way too many things and caused infinite loops in combination with Enchanted Alchemy gear (improving buffs through a buff is a bad idea. Recursion musn't happen).
I will patch this in soon, but there's still some other, serious issues I'm looking into.
Ever seen a +2000% Enchanting potion? I did, because I made one, without cheating or exploiting the Restoration glitch.
That obviously isn't balanced and made me remember that glitch in the first place.
I didn't find any other big problems, but there's these two exploits that make things impossible to balance; as if Twin Souls and Extra Effect weren't bad enough.
I am investigating whether these glitches can be prevented while keeping true to the spirit of the mod, but currently I am unsure.
Maybe there's a completely different way to approach this (possibly while keeping weapon improvement).
The future certainly is cloudy at the moment.
I will look into all the issues you mentioned.
I did not do research ingame yet apart from the pre-release testing, so this is just my preliminary thinking regarding
- Dual-Wielding and melee :
I realize 2x1H (still) does the most melee damage (as is appropriate), but dont forget 2H being buffed 50%, and 2H can also block.
Whether all this is balanced (benefit of a shield vs benefit of second weapon vs 2H vs magic), especially considering all the factors
I am unable to say; we will have to wait for a lot of feedback on that I think.
- Combat duration :
This is a valid concern and will be investigated. Generally, I dare say that if combat takes too long you set the difficulty too high.
I have little data on this, yet, and have to do some testing in regards to power attacks.
- Mages :
They are unchanged, so disregarding the new difficulty levels (which affects the player only) they certainly are more powerful now
conpared to weapon damage than they used to be. It's a bit of the ssence of the mod: Basicly everybody is as bad as a Mage now.
Also: it is easy to forget power attacks in calculations. In bursts melee can still easily outdamage a Mage.
- Compatibility :
It's designed to work on its own, changing Skyrim minimally to make it enjoyable without sweeping changes.
difficulty_1.0.esp can work standalone, in addition to anything that does not also affect the difficulty slider.
While this is not intended I made sure it can work that way to broaden the appeal. It's ok to just download it for the difficulty slider changes!
balance_1.0.esp is more tricky. I don't think it will break many mods, even balance one, since who deactivates the Grindstone?
But it could obviously unbalance the game if another mod attempt to balance the game while keeping weapon improvement (which would then become impossible).
- Bow :
This applies to all melee weapons, and the whole gameplay, since it is more difficult,
except for Mages who keep their level of mediocrity as before. Bow itself has a base damage like a greatsword or so and improves in exactly the same way.
Perked to 1.0 speed its base dps should be good enough; but of course
Before we had one more way to improve damage: Smithing, which was way too powerfull.
Now we're left with Potions, Perks, Skills, Enchants: the more difficult ones, and you have to utilize them more now to keep your level of difficulty.
In general, refusing to optimize just means playing at lesser difficulty, and without optimizing noone really has to worry about balance in the first place.
- Conclusion :
It is clear the balance in difficulty moved, the player is weaker now but should also be playing at lesser difficulty. Combat might in fact be shorter.
Dual Wield power attacks certainly have to be investigated. The discrepancy between 1 x 1H and 2 x 1H has been bothering me anyways,
and power attacks might get out of hand, especially with Redguards. If there is a problem here it should be easy to fix, tho.
#Edit: Some mistakes I made:
Bow is in fact between 1H and 2H melee; this is significant.
Also, Bow speed varies very widely. Needs some testing, too!
#Edit2: Dual Savagery (+50% Dual Wield Power Attack damage) is a bit of an upset but so is Twin Souls.
I feel empowered to disregard Orc and Redguard racial ability since it's once per day only.
It's ok to be totally uber once per day I think.
Currently I mostly wonder whether shields are worthwhile compared to a second 1H weapon; it might boil down to preference (which would be good).
I certainly try not to fall for the fallacy of trying to get everything to balance perfectly. there's bound to be advantages in one situation or another...
investigating Bows next.
#Edit3: Bows seem to work fine, thanks to arrow damage.
I sure would like to enchant me some arrows now, but I suppose there's another mod for that already.
From testing the balance overall seems to be very good (really, the only reason I decided to release it instead of just using it).
I like the mod concept. From what I have read however, I got the following impression:
- Archers that uses light bow (low dps high fire rate) who do not use poison and sneak would become an awfully unattractive play style, even with power shots and critical hits. And archers will do Worse when fighting dragons (assuming the use of deadly dragons or mighty dragons)
- Knowing the vanilla game has so few NPCs with dual style (unless we use mods like UFO), player will gain major advantages while focusing on dual perks (notice the last dual perk boost damage that does not rely on critical chance)
- All other melee play style (while factor out difficulty and smithing changes) will have their dps dropped siginificantly, except dual. Knowing the limitation of Skyrim vanilla enemy AI (terrible in using blocks) you are basically encouraging player to use blocks to gain an advantage. I am expecting all melee combats to last much longer. IMO it is not that enticing as I know how boring vanilla melee combat could be...
- Mages (player and enemies) can cause (relatively) far more damage than any melee fighters. Though I am hoping the (nerfed) archers can still be serious threat to mages.
- While I can use other combat mods to remedy some of my concerns. However, most (all?) of them attempted to balance the combat damage system...and is likely to conflict with your design pcinciples.
Please let me know if my understanding is flawed.
Bad timing, my apologies.